Interview: Herman Koch, author of SUMMER HOUSE WITH SWIMMING POOL

“I actually find it difficult to write about likeable characters,” says Dutch author Herman Koch, “because really, they can be quite boring.”
  Herman Koch is the author of The Dinner, the phenomenal international best-seller which was first translated into English in 2012. A novel that begins with pleasant, sophisticated adults sitting around a restaurant dinner-table, it gradually strips away the veneer of its characters’ civilised society to reveal nasty and brutish behaviour.
  “Unlikeable characters,” says Herman, “are generally more interesting and more colourful. It’s the reason, I think, why we like gangster movies, or The Sopranos, for example. These people might be murderers, but they’re interesting. We can even sympathise with them in some ways. So that’s the kind of thing I like to explore. I always have some likeable people in my books,” he laughs, “but they’re usually minor characters.”
  His seventh novel in total – he has also published seven collections of short stories – Summer House With Swimming Pool is Herman Koch’s follow-up to The Dinner, and has for its narrator another fascinatingly dislikeable character, Marc Schlosser. A doctor – a general practitioner – for the past 25 years, Marc has grown so bored with his patients’ complaints that he is now utterly indifferent to their pain and suffering.
  “He’s doing very routine work,” says Herman, “not like what a surgeon might do. And I think the status of the doctor in general has diminished a lot in the last 150 or 200 years, and Marc is having problems with that as well, having patients who are well-known, artistic people – actors, writers – who look down on him. So he feels like somebody who is just being used, and this is where his frustration comes from. And with frustration, in the end – not with everybody, but with Marc – comes disgust.”
  Compounding Marc’s disgust for his own and others’ failings is his contempt for humans who try to ignore their animal instincts.
  “I was thinking that we tend, sometimes, when we have our struggles and movements, our campaigns for equal rights for everybody, we forget our biological aspect, and that even the biological aspect now is sometimes a taboo, that it is not politically correct,” says Herman. “In the end, human beings differ from animals because the animal just thinks, ‘Well, now I have to eat, now I have to procreate.’ Or they’re not even conscious that they’re procreating. We as humans are conscious of that, certainly. But maybe in the way we look at each other, in the way a man looks at a woman, it can still be an animal-like look.”
  The story turns, however, not on animal instincts, but a very human sexual deviance, as Marc comes to realise that his 13-year-old daughter Julia is the focus of an adult male’s obsession.
  “When I started the book, I didn’t know how the story would end,” says Herman. “But while I was writing it, Roman Polanski got arrested again, for this case from the 1970s.” In 1977, film director Roman Polanski was arrested in California for the rape of a 13-year-old girl, and subsequently pled guilty to a charge of unlawful sex with a minor. “That’s why I put this film director [the Dutch-born Hollywood director Stanley Forbes] into the novel,” says Herman, “and why his girlfriend is called Emmanuelle, like the wife of Roman Polanski. I thought I would expose all the different facets of a story about a 13-year-old girl who in the eyes of her father is still a small girl, and a 13-year-old girl who herself thinks she is already a woman. It’s to do with a father whose girl is growing up, and what he might do to try to protect her.”
  As was the case with The Dinner, Summer House With Swimming Pool first offers the reader a cast of characters who appear to be sophisticated, tolerant and intelligent. Once Marc Schlosser begins scratching at the surface, however, glimpses of much cruder, illiberal and immoral characters quickly appear. It’s a snapshot, says Herman, of a far larger issue confronting Holland today.

  “I think that what I see sometimes in the Dutch is that they congratulate themselves – or they were congratulating themselves – about their tolerance. You know, we’re so tolerant because we accept people from every part of the world. But there’s also another side to that. The idea of tolerance, I think, comes out of feeling superior. What I feel is that you don’t have the right to say, ‘I tolerate this man from Africa or the Middle East.’ Because why should you? Is he tolerating you? The only way you are superior to this man is in numbers. You can say, ‘Oh, I will tolerate this other guy or this woman, but of course the culture is very primitive. But we can help.’ And then this whole ‘helping’ thing – sometimes an immigrant is not looking for help. He’s just looking for some kind of respect.
  “Lately, in Holland, with all the discussions of culture and religion, it suddenly came out that the Dutch are now voting for this right-wing, anti-foreigner party,” he continues. “The Dutch are saying, ‘Oh, we did all we could, and they’re not even grateful. So now we will tear off this mask of tolerance.’ But I think, deep inside, they were never that liberal at all.”
  In some ways, Herman Koch’s journey as a writer has been the reverse of the Dutch experience. Initially intolerant of all forms of authority, he has grown comfortable with becoming a figure of influence.
  “When you start as a writer, you start as a more rebellious person, more against teachers and adults, your family,” he says. “And then afterwards you become a father yourself, you have your own family, so your perspective changes a lot. You’re no longer this adolescent revolutionary,” he laughs. “You’re more trying to protect what you have. I knew I had to grow up, and as a writer use this experience of being an adult with my own family.”
  A film of The Dinner has already been made in Holland, with a Hollywood version to come starring Cate Blanchett, although Herman – previously an actor and screenwriter himself – has chosen not to be involved in the adaptation. “I think it’s better that the director is completely free to tell the story,” he says.
  Does he have a theory as to why The Dinner was such a tremendous international success?
  “Of course I’ve asked myself that question, because you can have a success in your own country – but then, just because it’s a success in your own country, can it hold the attention of people in other countries?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s a combination of things. Certainly The Dinner touched some sore spot to do with protecting children, but I also think it has to do with going against political correctness. People might say, ‘I’m not allowed to say this aloud, but I can think it at least.’ And when they read that kind of thing, it confirms that there is somebody who also thinks it – maybe the hero, maybe the writer – and that the thought isn’t forbidden. And that might also be a cathartic thing, a liberating experience.” ~ Declan Burke

  Herman Koch’s Summer House With Swimming Pool is published by Atlantic Books.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

We Have Nothing To Fear But The Fear Index Itself

I sat down with Robert Harris (right) a couple of weeks ago, to interview him for the Irish Examiner about his latest title, THE FEAR INDEX, and a very enjoyable conversation it was too, incorporating, among other things, the global economic crisis, the Third Reich, his relationship with Roman Polanski, and wayward neutrinos that appear to be travelling faster than the speed of light. It kicks off a lot like this:

“IT’S A colossal story,” says author Robert Harris of the global economic crisis, which forms the backdrop to his latest novel, THE FEAR INDEX. “In its way it’s a much, much bigger story than 9/11. But because it lacks, as it were, the burning towers and the iconic images, we tend to underestimate it. The governor of the Bank of England said yesterday that it’s possibly the worst financial crisis the world has ever seen. So I’m pleased to have written this book, because I’ve always seen myself as a political writer above all else, and it seems to me that this crisis is where politics is right now.”
  Harris began his career as a political writer as a journalist and BBC television reporter, publishing a number of non-fiction titles between 1982 and 1990. “All I’ve ever wanted to do in life is write,” he says, “but I needed to earn a living.” It was his work on SELLING HITLER (1986), an investigation into the hoax ‘Hitler diaries’, that led him to write his first novel, FATHERLAND (1992).
  “In the course of researching [SELLING HITLER],” he says, “I came across all the plans Hitler had for what the world would be like in the Third Reich, and I thought that would be interesting to explore as a non-fiction book. Imagine taking all the sketches and the maps, and the architectural designs, and creating a kind of ‘guide’ to a world that never existed. And then I realised I really couldn’t answer fundamental questions about this world — if one assumes that the world would have settled down to a Berlin-Washington axis, what would have been said about the fact that all the Jews had disappeared? How would that be handled in international relations? Would it be treated the same way as all the people killed by Mao, or what happened in Stalin’s Russia? Would détente have triumphed?
  “So I ended up walking through the looking-glass into a fictional world. And when I got there, I enjoyed it so much that from that moment on, that was all I wanted to do. But it all came through the desire to use fiction as a tool to explain the politics of now and history, and in a way, I’ve always gone on doing that. I’m interested in power, that’s my furrow to plough, as it were.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

In Like Glynn

Not naming any names or nowt, but as events this week in Ireland have proved, you can’t be too paranoid about the likely consequences when the worlds of business and politics collide. That’s a theme explored in ‘Limitless’ (see review here), the movie adapted from the novel THE DARK FIELDS written by Alan Glynn (right, in full-on Kenneth Branagh mode). As he explains in an Irish Times interview published today, it’s a theme Glynn further explores in the novels WINTERLAND (2009) and the forthcoming BLOODLAND (2011). To wit:

“People Do Get Away With Murder”

A writer of dark, thoughtful thrillers, Alan Glynn waited 10 years for his first novel to get the movie treatment. But when your hero Robert De Niro is starring in it, it’s worth the wait, he tells Declan Burke

“The idea of there being a ‘quick fix’ for everything in your life is one that’s current in the culture,” says Alan Glynn, author of THE DARK FIELDS, from which the film ‘Limitless’ is adapted. “There’s a drug for everything, there’s a quick diet, you can make yourself over, all these kinds of things. So it was a question of taking that notion and reducing it to a simple pill - if you take this one pill, you can have the world, but it’s going to cost you your soul.”
  ‘Limitless’ stars Bradley Cooper, who plays struggling New York writer Eddie Morra. Once Eddie is introduced to a new super-drug, NZT, his life is changed utterly. Productive, insightful and surpassingly intelligent, Eddie is soon making a fortune trading stocks. But every drug has its side-effects, and Eddie’s come-down involves paranoia, betrayal and the distinct possibility of an early death.
  Right now, Alan Glynn’s adrenaline rush has no need of artificial stimulants.
  “Before the movie started,” says Glynn of last week’s New York premiere of ‘Limitless’, “the director, Neil Burger, stood up and said he wanted to introduce a few people who were involved in the movie. And he said, ‘This all started with the book,’ and introduced me first (laughs). I hadn’t expected that, and I thought it was lovely, because after that he went through Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper, all the rest. So that was very gratifying.”
  What made it even better was that De Niro was sitting three rows behind in the theatre. “He was a hero of mine, as he was to a whole generation,” says Glynn. “If you had told me when the rights for THE DARK FIELDS were first signed [in 2001] that I’d have to wait another ten years to see it made, but Robert De Niro would be in the movie, I’d have taken that.”
  In a neat touch, the title of the book Eddie publishes in ‘Limitless’ is called ‘Illuminating the Dark Fields’. In the real world, THE DARK FIELDS has been re-released under the title LIMITLESS.
  “I’m not so happy about that,” he says. “Obviously, I’m very attached to the original title, it’s from the last page of THE GREAT GATSBY, and it has thematic resonances throughout the whole book, while the title ‘Limitless’ is the product of a marketing testing system. But the book has been re-released here and in the US, it was in the shops in the US before the movie opened and selling quite well. I mean, even before the movie has been released, the book has sold more copies now than it did on the entire run of its first publication.”
  Glynn, who lives in Dublin with his wife and two sons, lived in New York from 1985 to 1989, but only started writing THE DARK FIELDS after he moved back to Ireland from Italy in 1999. “That was around the time of the dot com bubble, and in the book there’s this whole section about the biggest corporate merger in American history, which I based on the Time Warner / AOL merger of the time.”
  The Faustian pact Eddie enters into is a theme Glynn subsequently explored in WINTERLAND (2009). Set in Dublin just as the property boom is going bust, and hailed as remarkably prescient on its release, it explores the shadowy nexus where the worlds of politics, business and white- and blue-collar crime intersect.
  “In anything I’ve ever written,” he says, “there always seems to be a dark, malign power figure at the heart of the story. It seems to me that the modern incarnation of that malign power in society is the CEO, who’s almost like the Machiavellian Prince figure. A politician or even a monarch might have a sense of responsibility to go with that power, but the CEO has a responsibility solely to his or her shareholders, so it’s almost an amoral power. In that sense it’s a very modern pure form of power, which can even be more evil in its consequences, with no regard all for any community or human value whatsoever.
  “I go into that in BLOODLAND as well. WINTERLAND is about the property boom in Ireland, but BLOODLAND has a broader, more international setting. Part of it has to do with the illegal mining of coltan in the Congo, and the lack of accountability there in the supply chain between the metals extracted illegally and high-end consumer products that are found in the First World. Coltan is essential for use in capacitors in the electronic equipment we use all the time - it’s in every mobile phone, every game console, that we use. But there doesn’t seem to be any moral connect between that and the conditions in which this stuff is extracted in the Congo, and which has in part been responsible for a war that’s been going on for nearly 20 years, in which five to eight million people have been killed. I mean, it’s covered intermittently, but the scale of it is mind-boggling. But because it’s not about oil, it flies under the radar, strategically speaking. I don’t want to sound polemical or that I’m pushing an agenda, but I’m using that to explore the kinds of power figures who control that trade, from the upper echelons of corporate America. That’s one strand of the story, and there’s a political aspect, and military contractors, and the privatisation of war as a business.
  “What I’m planning for the next book,” he continues, “which is called GRAVELAND - it’s the third in a loose trilogy - is to go back into the past, back to the 1870s in America, when the railroads were being built. There’s a character called James Vaughn who features in WINTERLAND, the old American corporate guy, he’s also in ‘Bloodland’ and he’ll feature largely in GRAVELAND - it goes back into his family history, almost like exploring a Kennedy-like dynasty.”
  Glynn was first inspired to write by what he calls the ‘great paranoid thrillers’ of the 1970s. How does ‘Limitless’ compares as a conspiracy thriller to that Golden Age?
  “It’s obviously different to the classic conspiracy thrillers,” he says, “the tone and the feel of those movies was so specific to the times, y’know, Watergate, Vietnam, and that paranoid, claustrophobic feeling can’t be recreated authentically. And it’s definitely not in this movie - there’s a lighter tone to this film, there’s a knowing, satirical edge to it that you didn’t get in the classic conspiracy thrillers.”
  While the movie ends on an upbeat but morally complex note, the novel THE DARK FIELDS has a very bleak and noir finale.
  “It’s not the book up there on screen,” Glynn concedes, “but you expect that. There’s always more depth in a book. In the movie, Eddie doesn’t get the really fuzzy end of the Faustian pact he gets in the book. But then, cinema is a whole different medium, there’s a totally different energy to it. The movie is the book’s story edited down to the bone.”
  That didn’t stop the author from enjoying the movie, which topped the US box office on its release last weekend.
  “To be perfectly honest, I grinned like a loon the whole way through,” he says. “I was anticipating feeling ambivalent, or even horrified, possibly, and afterwards there was such a sense of relief that I’d enjoyed it so much. I met Neil Burger two minutes after it finished, and I was able to shake his hand and say, ‘I loved it.’ Which was a great relief (laughs). To be able to speak positively about it is great. It’d be a strange position to be in otherwise, to have to either (a) lie about it or (b) tell the brutal truth. But I don’t have to do either of those, which is great.”
  Despite the themes of power and corruption, and the criminal activities in which his characters tend to dabble, Glynn is in no hurry to pigeonhole himself as a particular kind of writer.
  “I don’t really care about the labels. When I say I don’t see myself as a crime writer, I don’t mean that to sound judgemental. I love crime fiction, but that’s not in my head when I’m writing. I wouldn’t consider myself a literary writer either, I just do what I do.”
  The innate conservatism of the crime novel, where order almost inevitably emerges from chaos, is an unnecessarily restrictive constraint.
  “There is that element of conservatism and morality that exists in a lot of crime fiction, the idea that the wrong has to be set right. But some of the stuff I’ve done has almost been a cynical conclusion that right doesn’t triumph, that the harsh reality is that it often doesn’t, and that people do get away with murder.
  “I mean, by the end of WINTERLAND, the bad guy isn’t caught and held accountable, but he does die according to his own weakness. There’s a certain amount of wrapping-up there, but it’s a bit more complex than just the bad guy brought down by the good guy.”

Alan Glynn’s Top Paranoid Thrillers

‘Chinatown’ (1974)
“With its sun-drenched 1930s LA setting, a brilliant script by Robert Towne and unforgettable score by Jerry Goldsmith, Polanski’s ‘Chinatown’ is the ultimate study of power and corruption. It looks back nostalgically to the classic noir era, but it also roots itself in the malaise of the 1970s – because never before had a big screen American hero been so casually crushed by malign, unaccountable forces.”

‘Three Days of the Condor’ (1975)
“The ending is brilliant, it’s an ending they’d never use today. The Robert Redford character is standing outside the ‘New York Times’ offices, and he’s telling this guy he’s about to blow the story, this conspiracy, wide open. And the guy is saying, well, go ahead, but do you really think it’s worth it, every day for the rest of your life looking over your shoulder? And it all ends on a very dark, paranoid note …”

‘All the President’s Men’ (1976)
“Even today, it really stands up. I saw it again recently and it’s just fantastic. What’s great about it is the way it cuts out before the whole thing about Nixon really goes off, they’re typing away - tchk-tchk-tchck- it’s up there on the screen, it’s fantastic. And that kind of ending requires the audience to know what happened next, to be intelligent enough to make their own leap. That doesn’t happen a lot these days.”

‘Marathon Man’ (1976)
“I love Marathon Man. I saw it when it came out first, I was still a kid, and I absolutely adored it. Especially the music, by Michael Small. You can’t get it anymore. None of his scores are available, and he’s one of the key ’70s composers of music for paranoid thrillers - ‘Klute’, ‘Marathon Man’ and a couple of others.”

  ‘Limitless’ goes on general release this weekend. Alan Glynn’s BLOODLAND will be published by Faber & Faber in September.

  This interview first appeared in the Irish Times